A critique of life in India
Re-understanding lived reality of the country
Prologue
A central case for economic growth of a country is because of the strong correlation between GDP/capita and quality of life that can translate to wellbeing in all aspects of lives of its citizens.
But for India, despite faster economic growth of past decades, it hasn’t increased people’s satisfaction with their life and in reality has rather consistently deteriorated.
Indians tend to discount any global index that reflects this for its north atlantic bias.
But, if you stand on a public square in any city of India - you can confirm the general sentiment that majority of people are chronically in angry, frustrated or vacuous state.
Analysis
A precondition before details below is acknowledging that India is extremely poor country. If you’re here, you’re likely in top 1% of income or wealth bracket of country where bottom 90% of population essentially lives at a subsistence level.
Expectations & critiques are from top 1% urban POV with potential global optionality.
I spent first 25 years of my life entirely in India and most of last decade in Western world.
So, I do have an insider / outsider perspective on relative state of affairs regarding the gap.
Let’s dig into the experiential reality of daily life through the key factors:
1. Ideology - Interiority vs Exteriority
Indian civilisation is product of 5000+ years old Sanātana Dharma, essentially an inward looking eternal philosophy where root of all issues and their solutions lie inside oneself and conquering self is the way to resolve all conflicts and find peace.
This has kept the civilization going for eons by giving people means to cope with the eternal existential misery in a static world by simply changing their own perspective on things. But, the same perspective also prevents people from making changes in objective physical realm by taking away their agency to expect & act on raising the bar because an alignment is just not feasible among billion interior subjective barometers.
This is in stark contrast to abrahamic monotheistic religions with their foundations in exteriority, which in essence are call to action for masses to shape reality in the image of their ideal God.
This seems to have been a powerful motivator to make material changes in world - go through 100s of years of crusades, sail across the oceans to conquer and colonize vast swaths of the planet. On one hand it caused misery of others at epic scales, but paved a path to ungodly inventions that terraformed the planet.
Interiority remains essence of Indian civilizational conscience till date and permits the populace to romanticise & rationalize even the most egregious circumstances.
On top of that add the psyop of Ahimsa or Gandhian nonviolence, it essentially renders masses incapable to act for their principles and primes them for subjugation.
2. People - Quantity over Quality
With 1.45B people, India is most populated country with 10x the mean global density.
For reference - China is of the same population but the country is 3x in the area.
India has claimed of demographic dividend for a while, but the quality of the populace matters much more. Even though population level stats have improved a lot since founding of nation, the low rate indexes population extremely low on education, health, productivity along the quantity as well as quality axes.
9/10 people can be categorized within deficient category which is detrimental to all 10.
Tragedy of commons where even people at upper echelons fail to grow as humans.
A vast share of population is rendered incapable or unwilling to function desirably in a society, exaggerating every issue and keeping comprehension at guttural levels.
How does it pan out in practice?
You can’t expect nuanced reasoning beyond slogans and are forced to function with magical thinking on any topic.
You can’t establish contracts in low trust environment where distrust is the default.
You can't build mutually cooperative foundation with absence of ethics and integrity.
You can’t conduct a civil discourse with vandalization, mayhem, savagery, infractions, sadism as public norm and stepping out of home implies entering law of jungle.
With the right systems this should’ve been an asset but doom loop spiral between state → citizens with race to the bottom has made it a permanent liability and made the nation of 150M people dispersed amongst 1.3B net negative people population.
3. Natural environment
Climate
India’s geolocation on earth has made it a high risk nation due to climate change as heatwaves, storms, draughts, floods get more extreme with each passing year.
As with most of global south, vast urban regions of India are setting historically high heat records every year while half of the year stays at high 40s°C where one is stuck under lockdown within their houses with AC at full throttle for bare survival.
Combine that with broken urban design to trigger extreme urban heat island effect.
This not only makes basic existence extremely difficult, but puts a massive hit in productivity and growth potential of a country to become developed as well.
Pollution
› Air
Dry winter followed by dry summer coupled with hot weather makes India’s surface prone to dust. Add unregulated industrial discharge, transport, construction, waste burning and leads to India becoming home of 83/100 most polluted cities in the world and no major city within the safe bounds of safe human levels.
› Land + Water
Dumping residential / industrial waste remains common practice and eventually discharges without processing in either open land or water bodies around the country. This is the case that stirs up odor and always at the verge of causing next health issue.
› Sound
Vehicles honking, public loudspeakers and other common practices have made noise pollution a major problem, average traffic sound levels are often higher than typical nightclub and has caused hearing loss for +6% of the population.
It took me 2 years of living outside India to realise how strongly a wall of sound just hits you the moment you come out of Indian airport in contrast to a quiet city.
4. Household Utilities
Most of the essential household utilities needed on daily basis is non-existent, spotty or unreliable for entire 24 hours across almost every region in the country.
⚠️ Water
Most of the independent houses either don’t have a tap connection or limited hours of supply and definitely not drinkable water available. Most end up setting up private household borewell or need to get from a limited public tap or supplied via mobile water tankers. Increasingly difficult by year as water levels go down across the nation.
⚠️ Gas
Luckily Indian weather doesn’t require heating, but cooking gas is a need and again terminal household connections are rare and require most people to pick up / get delivered LPG cylinder from an agency on a monthly service subscription.
⚠️ Sewerage / Waste management
Waste management remains far from optimal. Systems for scheduled pick up or connection of drains remain rare. Solid waste, if collected, often ends up in open streets or landfills without complete processing and water waste along with potentially toxic chemicals in water bodies. A major testbed for health issues.
⚠️ Electricity
Electric grid used to be spotty, but in recent decade access has increased. Nonetheless daily power cuts lasting several hours are the norm and 24 hour reliable supply remains out of sight. This essentially means every household & business has to re-setup a fully functioning back up system (inverter, battery, generators) to support themselves at immense personal cost.
✓ Telecommunications
This is a field where India has leapfrogged to state of art in the last decade. Cheap smartphones and mobile internet availability has triggered a boom in consumer adoption by skipping entire wired connectivity layer across the nation.
A typical household ends up in firefighting mode on a regular basis to resolve issue with one of these essentials, being a steady source of overhead and focus distraction.
Select places where people have managed to solve these utilities are high-end gated communities in tier-1 cities, where agglomeration of households end up rebuilding most of these in private capacity so that public utilities don’t remain a daily struggle.
5. Public Infrastructure
Public infrastructure, hard + soft, struggles regarding coverage, quality, maintenance.
Urban Design
Almost all cities of India are organic outgrowth as a collection of patchwork around building codes, street requirements, population needs, nature instead of intentional design. This has essential made them concrete jungle box existence in the cities.
There exists a duality where burdensome regulations make getting through approvals impossible legally whereas disregarding them ends with no enforced consequences.
India needs to develop new cities from scratch, but that potency remains absent.
Transportation
Physical movement across Indian cities are essentially nightmare across the board. Roads, Railways, Air travel remain as the preferred ranking fo mode of transportation.
› Road
Primary way daily movement happens in India and 4 largest cities of India, which contribute ~25% of GDP are among 10 most congested cities in the world with average speeds at 20km/h while inter-city travel speeds haven’t improved in decades.
Poor road construction quality, proactive monitoring, coverage has brought the cities to grinding halt. Traffic rule following and enforcement remain absent by people and authorities. Issue of driving licenses via a learning & testing process remains a fiction.
› Rail
Primary way the masses move in India. They provide high capacity at cheap price but the demand outstrips supply on both quantity & quality. Modernization of tracks, railcars remain slow and suboptimal routing cap the speeds. Recent urban metros have helped but door-to-door travel end up needing roads, effectively nulling gains.
› Air
Travel infrastructure has seen massive improvement with airports buildout, private airlines boom and supporting digital infrastructure helping domestic flights ramp up on quantity and quality. Occasional nature of long distance travel and affordability to only top few % does limit the improvements for routine parts of life for most though.
› Education + Healthcare
These are foundational needs for anyone to get a fair shot in contemporary world. India has made some progress, but hasn’t tackled this in mission mode to catch up.
Public education and health care facilities remain scant, understaffed, terrible quality and mired in incompetence, corruption. Private sector has picked up some slack for well off people who can afford them and is a necessity for state of art service for now.
There has been a big push to develop public infrastructure by government in past decade, but they continue to happen away from urban areas where most people live and remains to be seen their impact in coming period.
My guess is it will ease moving stuff across long distances for businesses that has 2nd order effect on people and pull up existence of bottom half of the population, but for the others - their routine life will putter along the same path without a drastic uplift.
6. Politics
India held general elections in 2024, and this season was the first time I did a deep dive into state of affairs, functioning of machinery and it expectedly disappointed.
India is a rare country which adopted universal suffrage from inception of nation at extremely low economic and human development levels and this has kept the state of politics lowbrow mired in tribal politics ever since.
India celebrates being the largest democracy, while the populace failed to understand they’re their employees and literally treats them as the dynastic ruling class (RAJ).
Concept of India as a unified state didn’t exist until 1947. When the founding fathers dreamed up the nation, they had to accommodate for a vast racial, cultural, linguistic diversity in direct contrast to classical definition of a ethno-linguistic uniform state.
DNA of all leading parties is essentially socialist+statist where nation has ended up with a extremely centralized system with mandate to do everything, everywhere but accountability isn’t built into the system.
People get to vote every 5 years - while the agenda stays the same within common denominator of populist agenda. A vicious cycle exists where these events recur:
1. A corrupt tribal leader gains popularity through goonery
2. Makes promise to masses at poverty level for freebies that will provide immediate relief but won’t build up long term skills. Or, Literally bribes for vote
3. Gets elected to power positions and extracts resources from public for his allies
This creates a natural distrust between people and different levels of government across the country, leading to extreme centralization of decision making and resource allocation process which in return makes it impossible for citizens to get local issues resolved either due to resource constraints or decision vs implementation gap.
For reference, communist China spends 51% of budget locally vs 3% in democratic India.
As the development gaps between regions increase over time - calls for exclusions, quotas, blames across the fault lines get louder and desire to co-operate weeker.
Whether India remains a unified country or break into distinct constituent pieces over time - might be an actual open question.
7. Administration
When India became a sovereign country, it adopted the existing colonial British administrative structures almost entirely for the sake of operative continuity and that became the original sin of administration which has failed to understand that the design of the system always wins against the intention of individuals.
2 most important administrators in every district have the titles of District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police which are recruited from Indian Administrative and Police Services respectively, a lifelong recruitment that makes the permanent bureaucracy responsible to facilitate the government → citizens services.
Civil Services
Position of DM was originally designed in 1772 for british rule with 2 specific purposes: maximize revenue from the district and control population as Collector.
Gaining this position of power remains the dream of millions of Indians and creates a rampant culture of babudom where titleholders of paper pushing responsibilities can make people run around offices, stay unaccountable for delivering services, prone to corruption despite exceptional individuals.
Within each administrative org, there lies layers of titles who are responsible for extreme compliance but not the outcomes by design, where regular transfers every 1.5 years works as a effective political tool and not keep them around for long enough so they can’t go native and actually get attached to delivering results for the locals.
Law and Order
India adopted Indian Penal Code as criminal code wholly from the British design that was built to primarily protect official position holders from the citizens and that’s what it does.
Police, being the jurisdiction of state government, remains the prime source of corruption by collecting bribes, physical violence on innocent people and supporting VIP culture at will of political authorities while unaccountable to people.
Expect to call 100 and receive emergency police visit? File an FIR for the crime that you just witnessed? Expect to get an investigation done after filing it? Good luck.
Courts
Got into a dispute and need justice? Even if one manages to get past incompetence, briberies, corruption - good luck trying to get a hearing - with 30M backlogged cases, 8 years of average resolution period and 2/3rd of prison population still under trial.
Justice delayed is justice denied remains a lip service.
Will the people ever be free?
Full Digitalisation have been boon for specific service categories, but vast majority still require physical visits or physical documents that leaves no way for a regular person to get on with their lives without constant worry of injustice, wastage, dignity.
Administrators are offered personal staff, security, salaries and great perks. As VIPs,. they get to be driven around in red beacon vehicles for priority access to services and roads clear of traffic. So that sorts their life, why bother with the commoners?
In occasional extreme case, when issue spirals out of control and people end up protesting on streets with round the clock media coverage - a specific individual is transferred to next destination to calm things down and the system hums along.
8. Global view
Despite the definite progress over the past decades, India still remains mostly unfree with respect to Economic freedom for its residents. Despite all the suffocation if one decides to pursue something novel or ambitious - it’s highly likely that they’d have to engage international clients, capital or talent to achieve that.
Now, given the global status quo essentially works where rich nations distrust poor nations - this puts immense constraints on availing travel, capital, education, business, employment opportunities in a global purview.
Despite incessant talks and flexing muscle on geopolitical stage - Indian passport, a good proxy for nation power, continues to falter regarding access to rest of the world.
Overwhelmed with these constraints, increasing trend in net migration numbers for millionaires, students, employees and citizens continues to ramp up.
Epilogue
One wonders, why isn’t there a massive revolt against the status quo across the nation?
Ideology[1] explains big part of it, because for each of the issue you can can find a rare exception to justify how things are not that bad and continue with business as usual.
Another part seems to be Fish in the water scenario. Most people have had no contact with developed world, opposing ideas, global realities and now that they can find things out online - it just feel unreal to most and ease of finding rare negatives with developed world seems to neutralize the positives anyways in people’s minds and becomes a coping mechanism.
As of now, I expect quality of life will be continue to be claimed amazing for people in laptop class who have built themselves self sufficient houses where invoking a smartphone button magically brings a minion within 10 mins at their doorsteps with what they wish for at the cost of settling their aspirations from life / real world and confined themselves to magnificent prison yards called gated communities.
But, to expect a life of liberty, seems as futile exercise to hold breath for a lifetime.
It's depressing that most people reading it would agree on the subject.
The larger a nation, the harder the change to come and we are the largest of the nation now.